Applegate Farms is famous because it was my high-school job… ok, actually, it’s famous because some scenes of The Sopranos were filmed there.

My friend Garan worked there for a while, too, but he doesn’t have a hat because his head was too big to wear one. True story. He had to wear a white paper soda jerk hat, but even so girls were STILL chasing him around. Some days it was very hard to be friends with Garan, what with all the girls following him around and agreeing with everything he said.

The Applegates website says they are one of the largest ice cream retailers on the East Coast, and they have new shops all over. We worked at the first Applegates, on Grove Street, which was the only Applegate Farms when we worked there.

Also we had to walk there. Uphill both ways.

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Applegate Farms

CLIFTON — Two “modern day Ninjas” calling themselves Shinobi Warriors on a quest to rid the area of drug users and drug dealers have been put out of business by police.

On Wednesday at 2:35 a.m. police officers approached a car parked in the left lane of Route 46 east and found two Clifton men dressed in black claiming to be Ninjas. The men were wearing tactical vests and armed with knives in sheaths at their waists along with Ninja throwing knives, Chinese throwing stars, four-pointed tacks, swords, bows and arrows and nunchucks, said detective Capt. Robert Rowan.

The two men, Jesse Trojaniak, 19, and Tadieusz Tertkiewicz, 20, told police they were “modern day Ninjas” also called Shinobi Warriors on their way to deliver warning letters to known drug dealers and drug users to stop their “impure” activities. They told police they planned to leave the letters on the front doors of these individuals they had singled out.

Apparently these kids took the war on drugs literally.

Via “Clifton Police arrest Ninjas” in the Clifton Journal, thanks to Pandapassport’s recent tweet for tipping me off to the story in the first place.

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New Jersey Ninjas

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Ten Years Off

While I’m home and in job limbo, an editor/friend sent me a little blogging work. It’s mostly short assignments for a blog network, including some ghost work for a wedding site. Now that I’m based in the US, I can receive review samples, for some reason no one wanted to ship freebies to our hutong!

Anyway, I’m settling down to eating delicious American food and catching up with my folks. It feels like being home on college break again. I was chatting with my mom as she flipped through the mail.

“We got some wedding invitation samples for you!!!” she announced.

“Calm down, Mom, they’re for work. Really.”

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Jersey Girl

My PayPal adventures became less funny when they decided that I didn’t really pay WordPress for domain forwarding, and canceled the charges as an added benefit for my security. I’ve called a few times and sent 4 or 5 emails to explain that the charge for a blog about a Jersey girl with my name living in Beijing really is me, but they weren’t able to help me because I’m calling from Beijing, not New Jersey. My options at this point involve photoshopping my name onto a utility bill from my parents’ house.

PayPal assures me that their primary concern is my security. Unfortunately, my primary concern is being able to spend my money, and I’d prefer not to do that on listening to the hold music on Skype calls to customer service.

So I installed the WordPress.org package on Simpsonsparadox.com, which was what I intended to do with the site eventually, but I wanted a few months of regular blogging with regular WordPress to learn my way around. Fantastico makes setting up WordPress pretty easy, but it’s still a work in progress for me. The next steps are figuring out how to change this template to black text on white background, adding my Violet Eclipse blogroll to the sidebar, and making sure all of my links actually go somewhere.

On the plus side, I found this cute new banner!

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Blog Schizophrenia

There is a smell of cigarettes, sweet incense and overripe fruit, stronger than the constant smell of Beijing drain. We are turning down smaller and smaller alleys, and I lose track of which doorways with peeling paint and potted plants we’ve entered and which we’ve passed. This is the China of my imagination, centuries of Beijing families living in these homes, conducting their business in these tiny active streets. I imagine great intrigues of concubines and inheritance occured just inside these courtyards.

“Where are you from?” the rental agent asks me.

“New Jersey,” I say, figuring there’s no way he’s familiar with the Garden State, and about to I tell him it’s a small state next to Niu yue shi (New York City).

“Oh, there is a famous singer from New Jersey!” he says, “Do know you Bon Jovi?”

Of course I know Jon Bovi! I’m from New Jersey!

“I like Bon Jovi very much. I also like Poison.” he tells us.

“Poison?” Stick asks. “How about Motley Crue?”

We turn down an alley between two brick, one-story homes, with corrugated roofs and flowers in ceramic jars, still talking about hair bands.

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Displaced Jersey Girl

We got takeaway from the Korean place near the school, something that’s almost like American barbequed chicken. Will put on a DVD of music videos, to make our T-day even more American. Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Springsteen and Bon Jovi. The MTV actually made it surreal, because I could remember hearing that Kurt Cobain was dead, and now I’m watching his videos on Thanksgiving in China a decade later.

There was a bit of the inevitable imagining what our families were doing now. Right now, my mom’s on page two, line twelve, of the Thanksgiving List. What’s your family doing? Later we had an American chocolate cake, only it was actually a chocolate-tomato cake.

I brought my camera to record my crazy Yantai Thanksgiving, but unfortunately, my batteries died. I was annoyed, but three bottles of wine later, when we were singing Bon Jovi and Springsteen, and I might have been showing my Jersey Girl roots just a little bit, I was glad there was no camera around.

This morning, I called my folks and heard the whole room shouting “Happy Thanksgiving To Meg Now!” See, my mom brought the phone into the dining room and told everyone to… oh never mind.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

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Born In The USA

So yesterday, as the manicurist is painting the white part of my French manicure (Yes, I pay money to make my painted nails look like real nails) she asks if I’m going to get my eyebrows done too.

Did I mention that I have a giant zit? Big and ugly enough to make an average teenager cry? We’re talking Vesuvius here, on the middle of my cheek, and she’s noticing my eyebrows? They must be truly terrible. I said ok.

She led me into a back room, with a couch and a recliner. Reminiscent of an opium den, at least to those of us who read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when we were little girls. The smiling Asian lady who promises “Won’t hurt… Look so pretty!” just adds to the scene.

I need to take my glasses off for this. Ug. This is like asking Superman to slip into these nice Kryptonite boxers. I can’t seen a bloody thing without my glasses, I can’t even find my glasses without my glasses. I’m told to lie back and relax, as warm goo is smeared around my eyebrows. I suddenly remember an image from my Clifton childhood, a neighbor who plucked her eyebrows off and then drew her eyebrows back on. I’m wondering if Stick and I are at the relationship stage where he can say things like “Where’d your eyebrows go?” And then YANK! It’s off.

Some years ago, when I went to get my ears pierced, I almost left with only one hole because I couldn’t sit still, knowing that I was about to have another hole punched in my ear. Obviously, I got over my needle-phobia, I’m now the proud owner of two sets of ear piercings and a frequent blood donor. The trick is not to look at the syringe. YANK!

I put my glasses back on, and check myself out in the mirror. With my Coke-bottle glasses on, I can’t see a change, but without them I look gorgeous. I bat my eyelashes at myself until I steam up the mirror from standing too close.

In the grocery store later that day, I check out every woman I see. No one has a massive unibrow or other telltale signs of the lack of wax. Does everyone get their eyebrows shaped? Have I been the only one with huge caterpillars on my face and no one’s told me? Or is it, as I’m starting to suspect, that there’s no noticable difference between shaped and natural eyebrows?

My roommate Kristine was home when I got in. “Hi Meg. Why are your eyebrows all red?” was her greeting.

At least it took the focus off my zit.

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Vanity Fare